This invention relates to a diving jacket having a buoyancy regulating function.
Japanese Patent application Publication No. 1993-112291A discloses a diving jacket including a buoyancy regulator for diving which comprises a buoyancy regulating bag provided with a pair of shoulder belts and a waist belt. The shoulder belts extend downward from respective shoulder regions of the buoyancy regulating bag and fixed to the waist belt. The waist belt comprises a pair of belt members extending from both sides of a wearer""s waist region in a circumferential direction and fixed to a back-plate lying on the back of the buoyancy regulating bag by a means of plural bolts.
In the case of the above-cited well known buoyancy regulator, the positions at which the belt members are secured by bolts may be appropriately selected to adjust a vertical position of these belt members relative to the back-plate. However, this position adjustment requires troublesome operation of clamping or slackening a plurality of bolts.
It is an object of this invention to improve the diving jacket so as to facilitate the position-adjustment of the waist belt in vertical direction of the jacket.
According to this invention, there is provided a diving jacket comprising a jacket adapted to be inflated with air for buoyancy regulation, a back-plate mounted on an inner surface of the jacket""s back so as to extend in vertical direction of the jacket so that a cylinder for supply of the air is fixed thereto, a pair of length-adjustable shoulder belts extending downward from respective shoulder regions of the jacket and a length-adjustable waist belt extending in a circumferential direction of the jacket.
The waist belt comprises a pair of belt members extending from both sides of the wearers waist of the diving jacket in the circumferential direction. These belt members respectively having circumferentially front end regions detachably connected to each other and rear end regions opposed to respective the front end regions wherein the rear end regions are fixed to circumferentially front sections of associated connector plates disposed between respective the rear end regions and the back-plate.
The connector plates are respectively formed in the circumferentially rear sections with a plurality of dovetail tenons or a plurality of dovetail grooves arranged in vertical direction of the connector plates so as to extend in parallel one to another so that the circumferentially rear sections can be detachably engaged with transversely opposite sides of the back-plate by slidably moving toward the back-plate in the circumferential direction and the back-plate is formed along the transversely opposite sides with much more dovetail grooves or dovetail tenons than those formed in the connector plates so as to be operatively associated with those of the connector plates; and the connector plates and back-plate are formed with a stopper means by which disengagement between the dovetail tenons and dovetail grooves are temporarily prevented.